Neither CVS nor this manual is perfect, and they
probably never will be. If you are having trouble
using CVS, or think you have found a bug, there
are a number of things you can do about it. Note that
if the manual is unclear, that can be considered a bug
in the manual, so these problems are often worth doing
something about as well as problems with CVS itself.

If you want someone to help you and fix bugs that you
report, there are companies which will do that for a
fee. Two such companies are:

If you got CVS through a distributor, such as an
operating system vendor or a vendor of freeware
CD-ROMs, you may wish to see whether the
distributor provides support. Often, they will provide
no support or minimal support, but this may vary from
distributor to distributor.

If you have the skills and time to do so, you may wish
to fix the bug yourself. If you wish to submit your
fix for inclusion in future releases of CVS, see
the file HACKING in the CVS source
distribution. It contains much more information on the
process of submitting fixes.

There may be resources on the net which can help. Two
good places to start are:

http://www.cyclic.com
http://www.loria.fr/~molli/cvs-index.html

If you are so inspired, increasing the information
available on the net is likely to be appreciated. For
example, before the standard CVS distribution
worked on Windows 95, there was a web page with some
explanation and patches for running CVS on Windows
95, and various people helped out by mentioning this
page on mailing lists or newsgroups when the subject
came up.

It is also possible to report bugs to bug-cvs.
Note that someone may or may not want to do anything
with your bug report--if you need a solution consider
one of the options mentioned above. People probably do
want to hear about bugs which are particularly severe
in consequences and/or easy to fix, however. You can
also increase your odds by being as clear as possible
about the exact nature of the bug and any other
relevant information. The way to report bugs is to
send email to bug-cvs@gnu.org. Note
that submissions to bug-cvs may be distributed
under the terms of the GNU Public License, so if
you don't like this, don't submit them. There is
usually no justification for sending mail directly to
one of the CVS maintainers rather than to
bug-cvs; those maintainers who want to hear
about such bug reports read bug-cvs. Also note
that sending a bug report to other mailing lists or
newsgroups is not a substitute for sending it to
bug-cvs. It is fine to discuss CVS bugs on
whatever forum you prefer, but there are not
necessarily any maintainers reading bug reports sent
anywhere except bug-cvs.

People often ask if there is a list of known bugs or
whether a particular bug is a known one. The file
BUGS in the CVS source distribution is one
list of known bugs, but it doesn't necessarily try to
be comprehensive. Perhaps there will never be a
comprehensive, detailed list of known bugs.